A contact center manages all client contacts of a business or other entity through a variety of mediums, such as telephone, fax, letter, e-mail and, increasingly, online live chat. Distinct from call centers, that purely handle telephone correspondence, contact centers have a variety of roles that combine to provide an all encompassing solution to client and customer contact. Contact centers have many different configurations.
Contact centers can include automated dialer to effect outbound contacts to customers for a variety of different reasons, such as emergency notifications, debt collection, telemarketing and the like. Automated dialers enable a contact center to contact as many customers as possible in a limited time period. In current dialing solutions where there are multiple ways to contact a customer, such as home phone, office phone, mobile or cellular phone, pager, and the like, phone numbers can organized by device type (e.g., home phone, office phone, mobile or cellular phone, pager, and the like) so that a first device type is attempted first, a second device type second, and so on. However, this organization is in the discretion of a supervisor and might be required to be changed frequently based on changing circumstances. Also, there is no way to account for the day of the week or special days, such as holidays. Once set by the supervisor, the dialer attempts will be made to reach the customer in the same set order (e.g., if set first for office phone, second for home phone, and third for cellular phone) regardless of the day of the week, time of day, or applicable holiday (if any). In other words, it will use the set order until the dialer gets a response irrespective of whether the current day is a national holiday, weekend day, or business day. When the day of the week is a weekend or a national holiday, for example, the most likely number to try would be either the home or cellular phone numbers followed by the office number. Following the set order would therefore cause the dialer to waste precious time by making unanswered calls to the office phone number first. As a typical automatic dialer makes thousands of calls each day, the wasted time can be substantial.